With the NCERT reconstituting its Class 11-12 political science textbook panel with at least four members carrying documented RSS, ABVP-BJP affiliations, NCP (SP) on Thursday accused the Centre of systematically rewriting India's political history to serve the ideological project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
"This is not curriculum reform — it is ideological capture," said NCP(SP) spokesman Mahesh Tapase said. "Every time NCERT quietly reshuffles a textbook committee, we discover the same pattern: professional historians and political scientists pushed out, and in their place, people with a long institutional relationship with the RSS and its student wing, the ABVP, are inducted. The BJP is actively trying to ensure that every child in this country understand the Constitution, the freedom struggle and democracy through the lens the Sangh wants them to see it through."
He also drew a link to the 33 political scientists from an earlier NCERT panel, who had publicly warned that the council was engaged in deletions of sentences and removal of sections. "Three dozen scholars from across ideological lines warned against NCERT's unilateral attempts to modify and revise textbooks produced collaboratively by scholars from across the country. The government has a predetermined narrative and that is what it wants to instil in the minds of students, Tapase said.
Tapase further stated that India's freedom struggle gained momentum and support amongst diverse cultures and ethnicity. The RSS did not participate in the movement against colonial rule in any organised way, and its own cadre still seems to be openly hostile to the values enshrined in our Constitution — equality, secularism, and social justice among them. “Now, decades later, the ideological descendants of the Manuwadi tradition want to sit in judgement over how India's children are taught to understand Nehru, Ambedkar, Gandhi and the freedom struggle. This is a hostile takeover of the national history."
Tapase demanded that the RSS must stop dumping their ideologies on the young minds of the country. He warned that "NCP (SP) will not stay silent while the Constitution that Dr Ambedkar gave this nation is quietly edited out of the classroom, chapter by chapter.
